[i63]
Paris under its October evening, thought that it looked like a kind of lake. A bend of the Seine had overflowed, had spread itself just as the ground allowed it. But, instead of water, there were three million people.
As a matter of fact, men had, indeed, replaced the prehistoric water. Many centuries after it had withdrawn, they had begun a similar overflowing. They had spread themselves in the same hollows, pushed out in the same directions. It was down there, towards Saint-Merri, the Temple, the Hotel de Ville, towards the Halles, the Innocents' cemetery, and the Opera, it was in the places where the water had found the greatest difficulty in running away, which had kept on oozing with infiltrations, -with subterranean streams, that men also had most completely saturated the soil. The most densely populated and busiest quarters still lay over what had once been marsh.
Like the overflowing of the water, the overflowing of people had followed depressions in the surface, circumvented and avoided obstacles, and slowly spread as far as it could up the beds of valleys. But at the same time the human flood had spontaneous movements of its own, apparently capricious, and acted in obedience to tendencies which were foreign to the water. Sometimes it defied the law of gravity. After behaving like a lake, just when, like a lake, it had found its own level and might be expected to lapse into stagnation, it had proceeded to behave like a mouldy soil or like herbage. It had attached itself to certain slopes, crept up them, seemed attracted by the summits, and covered them little by little.
So it was that Paris, very gently, had climbed up her bills* Not only had she spread herself at an increasing distance from her river, but she had even forgotten it. The shape of its valley no longer controlled hers, or if it did, it was with the addition of more mysterious laws. To explain the growth of the city, it did not even suffice any more to think of it as a vegetal growth. You had to bring human eyes to bear on the site, to look up at the heights, to realise how the lie of the land worked on the mind.